Bruce Highway upgrade to reduce fatal crashes from Proserpine to Bowen

A number of roadside memorials will be temporarily removed to make way for the upgrades, which aim to reduce the potential for head-on collisions on the Bruce Highway.

Friends and family who lost loved ones to crashes on a deadly stretch of the Bruce Highway will be asked to remove flowers, crosses and other roadside tributes to make way for $44 million of upgrades aiming to prevent further fatalities.

Memorials including Jakob Daniel French’s and Sandra Clay’s will be temporarily taken down during $44m in state and federal government funded roadworks on a 13km stretch of the Bruce Highway that has been the site of 16 crashes in the past 10 years.

Upgrades planned for this section, between Ten Mile Creek at Proserpine and Yeates Creek at Bowen, include widening the highway to install wide centre-line treatments, which reduce the potential for head-on collisions by providing additional separation between vehicles travelling in opposite directions.

Brisbane-based BMD Construction Pty Ltd has been awarded the contract to deliver the works, funded by the Australian and Queensland governments on an 80:20 basis as part of the $13 billion Bruce Highway Upgrade Program.

Transport and Main Roads has promised to return these roadside memorials their original locations on completion of the highway upgrades. Picture: Facebook

The works’ announcement comes ahead of Road Safety Week (August 16-20), a statewide crackdown aimed at reducing the road toll through high visibility mobile and static enforcement activities.